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CPRC in the news on concealed handgun laws in Louisiana

28 Nov , 2014

The Times-Picayune discusses the Louisiana’s concealed handgun law:

A study by Crime Prevention Research Center, a gun-carrying advocacy site, looked at permit data from 2007-2013. It showed for each 1 percentage point increase in the adult population holding permits there is roughly associated with a 1.4 percent drop in the murder rate.

Peter Scharf, a Criminologist at Louisiana State University School of Public Health says those numbers are misleading. Over the past 40 years Scharf has published eight books on criminal justice and research into gun violence and he says communities with a high number of citizens carrying permits are typically areas where the crime rate is relatively low.

“There’s certain cultural attributes that go along with the communities where those rates are high,” Scharf said.

As of December, Louisiana had 136,505 active concealed carry permits. About 3.9 percent of the adult population in Louisiana holds a permit; that’s fairly low compared to 30 other states. Scharf says in poorer communities where the crime rates tend to be higher there is gun ownership, but they largely obtained through the secondary market, which means they are undocumented. . . .

The newspaper not only cited our study but also the number of permits came from our previous study. The discussion by Peter Scharf is inaccurate in that none of our research relies on purely cross-sectional comparisons. The article also cites the Violence Policy Center as a source for the behavior of permit holders. For an analysis of the errors in their report see here.